A conservative group took credit for a barrage of anti-net neutrality comments posted on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's website this week, but it denied generating fake activism.

The Center for Individual Freedom said it did not use a bot to generate comments after news reports raised questions about the legitimacy of the posts. Between Monday and early Wednesday afternoon, the FCC had received more than 128,000 comments duplicating the language provided by CFIF.

A handful of people whose names are on the bot-generated comments have denied making the comments, according to a report by ZDNet. The 83,400 comments, filed to the FCC's comment system between Monday and Wednesday, all contain the same text, reading in part:

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's website slowed to a crawl after comic and political commentator John Oliver urged viewers to flood the agency with comments in support of net neutrality, in what appeared to be a repeat of a 2014 incident.

With the FCC headed toward a repeal of net neutrality rules it passed in early 2015, Oliver on Sunday echoed his "Last Week Tonight" commentary on the topic from three years ago. (Note to viewers: The link to Oliver's new diatribe is not safe for work.) As in 2014, the FCC's website seemed to buckle under the load late Sunday and early Monday, but the cause may have been more sinister than a flood of people expressing their support for net neutrality rules.

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How to prevent your data from being searched at the US borderMon, 08 May 2017 09:37:00 -0700Grant GrossGrant Gross

During the past two years, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has targeted ever larger numbers of travelers' smartphones and laptops for searches as they cross the border into the country.

U.S. courts have generally upheld a so-called border search exception to the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, allowing CBP to search electronic devices without a court-ordered warrant. In April, a group of lawmakers introduced legislation to require warrants to search devices owned by U.S. citizens and other legal residents, but for now, the law allows for warrantless device searches.

A U.S. appeals court has denied a request by broadband trade groups to rehear its decision last June to uphold the Federal Communications Commission's controversial 2015 net neutrality rules.

The court's decision on Monday is a hollow victory for net neutrality supporters. Just last Wednesday, new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to repeal the rules at the agency, without a court ordering him to do so.

Pai didn’t provide a lot of detail about his proposal during a speech Wednesday, but during the rulemaking, the FCC will seek public comment on how best to move forward with new net neutrality rules or guidelines, he said. The FCC is scheduled to release the text of Pai’s proposal on Thursday.

The chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to announce plans to repeal the agency's 2015 net neutrality rules on Wednesday.

Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, will likely announce a plan to reverse course on the 2-year-old regulations and end the agency's classification of broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service. In a Wednesday speech, Pai will reportedly announce that he is scheduling a vote for the FCC's May 18 meeting to begin the process of repealing the rules.

Pai has called the net neutrality rules a mistake that "injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market." President Donald Trump, who appointed Pai as the FCC's chairman, has also criticized the regulations.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to deregulate the providers of the business data lines connecting broadband service to many small businesses, schools, hospitals, and ATM machines.

The deregulation of business data services, or BDS, could mean broadband price hikes for those businesses as well as for mobile phone customers, critics said. BDS provides the backhaul that connects mobile towers to the wired internet.

If you operate a small or medium-size U.S. business, you can expect to pay more for broadband services in the near future because the U.S. Federal Communications Commission plans to deregulate providers of business data lines, critics of the proposal say.

Users of ATMs, shoppers in stores that use credit card scanners, and mobile phone customers could also see prices go up after the FCC deregulates the so-called business data services (BDS) market. Schools and hospitals also depend on BDS for their broadband service, and prices could rise as much as 25 percent in areas where the FCC removes price caps, critics warn.

The FCC is scheduled to vote Thursday on a proposal from Republican Chairman Ajit Pai that would deregulate large parts of the BDS market, which generates an estimated US$45 billion a year for AT&T, Verizon, and other telecom carriers. Incumbent telecom carriers welcome the plan, saying there’s plenty of competition in the BDS market, sometimes called special access.

A U.S. Federal Communications auction of repurposed television spectrum has raised US$19.8 billion and will pave the way for mobile carriers to offer faster and more reliable service across the country.

The 70MHz in new spectrum available will allow carriers to provide fast 5G service in coming years, FCC officials have said. It was the world's first two-sided auction allowing TV stations to indirectly sell spectrum to mobile carriers and other users of wireless spectrum.

The auction should speed up networks that have slowed as U.S. residents move to "data-hungry smartphones," the FCC said in a press release. About 70 percent of U.S. residents now have smartphones, the agency said.

Imagine a fellow airplane passenger sitting next to you and yelling into his mobile phone for six hours during a cross-country flight.

If simply thinking about that scenario gives you a headache, you're not alone. On Monday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission killed a plan to allow mobile phone calls during commercial airline flights.

Since 2013, the FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration have considered allowing airline passengers to talk on the phones during flights, although the FAA also proposed rules requiring airlines to give passengers notice if they planned to allow phone calls.

Two GoFundMe campaigns have raised more than $290,000 in an effort to buy the web browsing histories of U.S. politicians after Congress voted to allow broadband providers to sell customers' personal information without their permission.

It's unclear if those efforts will succeed, however. Even though Congress scrapped the FCC's ISP privacy rules last week, the Telecommunications Act still prohibits telecom providers from selling personally identifiable information in many cases.

The Russian government used "thousands" of internet trolls and bots to spread fake news, in addition to hacking into political campaigns leading up to the 2016 U.S. election, according to one lawmaker.

Disinformation spread on social media was designed to raise doubts about the U.S. election and the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat.

"This Russian propaganda on steroids was designed to poison the national conversation in America," Warner said Thursday during a Senate hearing on Russian election hacking. The Russian government used "thousands of paid internet trolls" and bots to spread disinformation on social media.

The sale of tech publishing pioneer International Data Group to China Oceanwide Holdings Group and China-based IDG Capital is final.

The deal for China Oceanwide Holdings Group to acquire a majority stake in International Data Group was first announced in January. Tech analyst firm IDC and venture capital firm IDG Ventures are included in the deal.

China Oceanwide hosted an event in Bejing today to announce the closing of the deal. The companies did not disclose the terms of the sale.

Reacting to concerns about the mass collection of photographs in police databases, U.S. lawmakers plan to introduce legislation to limit the use of facial recognition technology by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations.

The FBI and police departments across the country can search a group of databasescontaining more than 400 million photographs, many of them from the drivers’ licenses of people who have never committed a crime. The photos of more than half of U.S adults are contained in a series of FBI and state databases, according to one study released in October.